La Caverna is a restaurant that I have mixed opinions on. There are parts of it that I loved, and hated, and some that I thought were decent, and I would like to go over this restaurant so you can get an honest opinion on whether you should go or not.
Let's start by talking about the atmosphere. The restaurant is named La Caverna, it is based on a cave, and they take this theme and run with it in clever and practical ways. The walls were made of stone, and the restaurant was in the shape of an unperfect oval. This paired with the cave paintings of various primal creatures and the dim lights, making it look like the light was coming from a fire, tied the whole theme together, making the place feel like a set from the Ice Age movies, but without the terrible CGI dodo birds. However, if I did have to give one critique, the music was not very fitting and it made me lose immersion. Considering that La Caverna is a club, they were playing generic pop songs, but I feel as if they could have found songs that are still popular and good to listen to, while still maintaining a more primal theme. For example, if they played popular songs from the 50s and 60s, that would maintain a prehistoric theme perfectly!
Despite these critiques, the atmosphere in La Caverna is meticulously crafted and immersive and is a hugely positive part of the experience.
The service at La Caverna is also great and put a good taste in my mouth before the food puts a bad one in it. First of all, the service was very fast, only taking around five minutes for the appetizers to arrive, and only taking around fifteen minutes for the main dishes to arrive afterward. This, given the fact that La Caverna is a club in New York, and that we visited on a crowded Saturday night, is beyond impressive to me. Second of all, the waitress we got was very kind, and she spoke in an energetic voice. The service here was very nice, and you could tell how passionate they were about their jobs. Even if the food wasn't.
I am very mixed about the food here. Some dishes were great, some were decent, and some had severe room for improvement, adding up to an overall mediocre performance. The appetizers we got for the table were chips and guacamole and wings. The chips were quite hard, they almost came off stale but they didn't have much crunch to them, and the guacamole's ingredients weren't mixed that well, as the tomatoes and onions were only on top of the guacamole. However, the two did combine well in a nice, mellow flavor.
I didn't like the wings at first, but after a few bites, I warmed up to them. The wings had just the right amount of crunch and spice to them, not being too spicy to the point where it hurts to eat, but not bland enough to the point where it is hard to eat without gagging.
We then got to the entrees, and most of them left serious room for improvement. I got a steak fajita, my brother got shrimp tacos, and my dad got steak quesadillas and a Caesar salad. Luckily (for the sake of this review, not for my taste buds) I got the chance to try all four of these diverse dishes. I first tried my brother's shrimp tacos, and they were great. The shrimp's strong flavor and the onion's crunch went very well with the guacamole, and the combination also applied to the texture, as the guacamole drowned out the surface of the shrimp, which I'm not fond of. Unfortunately, this put me in a false sense of security that was immediately broken in the next dish I tried; the fajita.
The peppers and onions were oversized, and most of the time longer than the steak the dish was named after! The cheese had no flavor while making the texture worse, the steak had very little seasoning, and the vegetables seemed to be seasoned by hand sanitizers because they had an aftertaste very similar to theirs. Also, the tortilla it was served on tasted crappy and artificial, similar to the taste of something like a wet wipe.
My dad's Caesar salad was the next thing I tried, as it was the next thing to come out of the kitchen, and it gave me hope for the following dishes. As someone who's not a fan of caesar salad, I liked it. The lettuce was not overpowered by the dressing, and while the croutons did not have much of a crunch, they combined with the lettuce well in taste, making a pleasant dish and a good palate cleanser. However, the last dish I tried, my dad's steak quesadilla, immediately uncleansed my pallet, and was nowhere near as good. They put a type of sauce on top of the quesadilla, most likely sour cream, and it drowned out all the tastes and texture of all the other ingredients. It wasn't a quesadilla dish with sour cream, it was a sour cream dish with steak quesadillas. Top that off with the fact that I don't like sour cream, and it left a bad taste in my mouth until dessert came out.
For dessert, we got churros, and they were quite nice. They didn't have much cinnamon on them, but that was masked by the excellent caramel sauce paired with the texture of the c read more